What are the major mechanical themes in the set according to your vision?
Madness, Duel, and powering out huge fatties.

Please present six common cards of a color different from the color in the second round pitch. These cards should clearly demonstrate at least one major mechanical theme of the set.

Skeletal Sandwurm 5B
Creature - Skeleton Wurm
B: Regenerate ~.
Dig 2 (2, Discard this card: Reveal cards from the top of your library until you reveal a land card. Put that card into your hand and the rest on the bottom of your library in a random order.)
6/1

Thirsty Dryblood 2B
Creature - Vampire
Lifelink
As long as you control more lands than an opponent, Thirsty Dryblood gets +2/+0.
1/2

Mineshaft Shade 4B
Creature - Shade
1B: ~ gets +2/+2 until end of turn.
Madness 1B (If you discard this card, you may cast it for its madness cost instead of putting it into your graveyard.)
2/2

Tibalt's Brigand B
Creature - Human Rogue
~ can't block.
When ~ attacks, any player may discard a land card. If a player does, prevent all damage ~ would deal this turn.
2/1

Drought of Tears 2BB
Sorcery
Destroy target land.
Dig 2 (2, Discard this card: Reveal cards from the top of your library until you reveal a land card. Put that card into your hand and the rest on the bottom of your library in a random order.)

Death Wind XB
Instant
Target creature gets -X/-X until end of turn.

In 50 words or less, explain how this theme fits into the set, either mechanically and/or in terms of flavor.
Dig, Duel, and Madness synergize with each other and provide opportunities to play Big Spells and Sandwurms, which reward hitting your lands as well as representing the bigger-fish of the Frontier power-politics. Black is home to conservative, arrogant land-owning vampires, and the more ruthless members of Tibalt's bandits.

Barely made it in time! What a weekend! What a world! I tried to make it clear that this pitch includes neither gold nor Eldrazi within the fifty words, but I'll have a longer argument on the wiki shortly.

While I don't agree with the directions of this pitch, I felt the card designs have impressive flavor, and unlike many pitches, the pitch showed how the mechanics are intended to be woven together into a particular style of game play, with cards like Tibalt's Brigand. Death Wind is a really fitting reprint.

Here are the directions I didn't agree with:

The Sandwurms look too much like Wurms from other sets (apart from the dig ability). If we decide to do Sandwurms rather than Eldrazi, we should come up with some special identity for them.

I'm honestly not sure how exciting a "race for land" theme would be. Currently, it just means playing one land per turn, playing them as you draw them. I don't think players will enjoy discarding a high-impact card like a Sandwurm in exchange for a land card, although that's exactly what this land race is calling for.

If there is going to be a race for land, I think there should be effects that give you a land as a reward for doing something; for example as a reward for getting an attacker past blockers. I still feel that getting such rewards in the form of Gold counters would feel more exiting as a set theme than getting rewards in the form of land cards, though.

Even if we do have a race for land, we definitely should not use the "if you control more lands than your opponent" clause. Most players won't be able to track the land count by memory, and it will be a hassle to have to count and recount your lands and your opponent's lands every few turns. I can't imagine it would be worth doing this mechanic. Also, it seems unfair that the player who went first would never lose on land count for the first few land drops unless that player is mana screwed.

One possible land-racing mechanic is "if you are the last player to have played a land this game, BONUS." It might play too similar to landfall, but it inspires players to one-up each other with land drops, doesn't punish the player who went last, and doesn't require counting. (There could be some token card that you pass back and forth between players to show which player played a land most recently; otherwise it's not too hard to remember normally either.)

I don't think we should use the version of the Duel mechanic that requires discard. I posted the reasons here, but the gist of it is that I believe both the discard version of Duel and Madness are bad mechanics, and we should not be doing them just for the sake of comboing with each other. There is a fix for Duel without using Madness.

I think you make some good points, Chah. I've had some reservations from the outset about how much a "if you control the most lands" mechanic would punish players and work as a win-more.

To be clear, the "your lands > opponents lands" mechanic, as I was foreseeing it, would be one of Black's ways of really associating with the lands. I've been trying to cultivate ways of getting the Daniel Plainview-style vampires, and if the mechanic appeared in roughly the same quantities as the "your opponent has 10 or less life" mechanic, I expect it wouldn't be a problem. It's a little evil, but as long as it's on evil cards, I think it's probably worth testing.

I was foreseeing B-G-u being the colors that really dealt with lands. Each of the colors obviously would have some cards built into more aggressive or midrange strategies as well as the top-end battlecruiser effects, but Red and White are the natural place to put a lot of Top-Down Western cards, so this would be an effort to reinforce stronger mechanical themes elsewhere. This pitch sadly only shows Black's side of things, and it's admittedly difficult to extrapolate what other colors would be like, but suffice it to say that Black, generally, would be trying to get value out of the midrange.

It may definitely be right to abandon Madness. I'm not attached to it at all, but I also don't care for the reveal-based Duels that I've seen so far. We may be able to resolve that minigame; we may find it best to make a combat mechanic to fill that flavor-space.

I totally agree that the Sandwurms need a strong identity, and we'll definitely be working on that. Right now the only thing I'm really confident in is the idea of building a Battlecruiser set that is different from Rise of the Eldrazi.

We should definitely look into the permanently-reveal version of Duel. Technical concerns include how you handle Mind Rot, Thoughtseize and Mind Twist effects. Gameplay concerns include the Telepathy problem of making private information public. I don't know that either of those are deal-breakers and want to play with it before judging it.

If we use Dig and Buried Treasure, we may also find a version that just works off cards revealed from the library. Possibly "Look at the top three cards of your Library. Reveal one, then put them back in any order." Comparing CMC would be too much like Clash, but we could compare card types or some other factor as well. Not loving this idea, but again, seems worth checking out.

Chah, you're right - I was responding more to my own reservations about the mechanic than to your actual points. Re: memory and land counting: I appreciate that this could be an issue, but I don't think it's actually a big problem. In the early game, when the land-count cards presumably matter more, the counting is easier to do, and if you include land-counting cards in your deck, you know what to look for Lands in play don't fluctuate wildly or haphazardly (without intervention), and the climactic value of lands when someone finally does turn a card on or off certainly has value. Keeping track of land counts, while a cost on attention that does need paid, is easier than keeping track of the cards in an opponent's graveyard, which we've seen enough of recently.

Permanent-reveal Duel, to be straightforward, doesn't seem fun to me? I question how well it represents either the "flurry of shots" or "tense standoff" styles of Western shootouts, but more than that, I question who it is fun for. While there are unquestionably problems with Discard-Duel, it as a mechanic can have a strong appeal to adrenaline-Timmies (leveraging the future for the present), Johnnies (setting up situations where you can chain Duel effects with madness ones), and Spikes (as the decision-making in Duels can prominently display play-skill). Prerevealing cards may be interesting to a large group of players, but for me, it just reminds me of Forecast. Maybe if these were scholarly wizards having an academic row - "My idea is bigger than yours" - it would make more sense? I could be overthinking this, but that's my take so far.

I like permanent-reveal duel, to me it feels more like Induce Despair from ROE or Infernal Spawn of Evil from Unglued than forecast. "Even though I can't cast my big monster yet, just know I'll get to smash you with it soon!" I loved Infernal Spawn of Evil when I started playing and crammed it into all sorts of decks where it didn't belong, just because it was fun to instill in my opponent that dread of a huge monster on the way. I would love to see Duel do the same thing, but that wouldn't be possible with discard-duel.

If we include a duress effect or two that only hits non-creatures, it actually incentivizes you to reveal your big monster creatures in duels instead of instants or sorceries, which is perfect, because that's the gameplay I think we want to encourage. For that reason I would much prefer cards like duress over cards like thoughtseize. Random discard is interacts most awkwardly with permanently-revealed cards, but I don't see a problem with just leaving it out of the set. In fact, ROE had Inquisition of Kozilek as its only discard spell, if I remember correctly, so it seems fine to keep discard at a low level in Frontier.

Yeah, Infernal Spawn of Evil is forecast, but the forecast cards themselves never instilled that same sense of dread, because their castable forms were all so lackluster. That won't be a problem in Frontier, when you're revealing Sand Wurms/Eldrazi/etc.

It's possible that the "permanently reveal an unrevealed card" mechanic gets messed up when you temporarily reveal all of your cards due to an effect like Duress, because theoretically it's possible to lose track of which cards were revealed before the Duress. There are any number of ways players can make sure not to lose track, but none of them are obvious as the default to be used. I need to check back on R&D articles about forecast design to see if a "permanently reveal" version was considered.

Then again it's possible that the floor rules can handle that, like the case with Miracle where many designers tried the mechanic before but deemed it impossible.

I see, that does sound like a potential issue. We could keep it from coming up in limited by not having much discard, again, ROE had one discard spell. I'm confident that solutions for how to play in constructed formats could be found, and I don't think it should be a big strike against the mechanic. There are other awkward cases, though, like playing Telepathy and then Naturalizing it later.

Pasteur, what I see in the permanently-reveal Duel is that there's plenty of both luck and skill involved, but the skill is not the type that creates bad tension or punish you for trying to win the duel.

If you just want to win, you can go for it and not get punished for trying to win.

But you can also try to hold back your best card and show your second best card so that you can win a duel when you really need to. (I imagine that Duel cards will have a wide range of power level. Some cards might say, "If you win the Duel, put a +1/+1 counter on this creature" while others say "If you win the Duel, destroy target creature.") You can also try to bait the opponent into revealing his/her best card with a weaker Duel spell before casting the main one that you want to win.

There could also be situations where the skill is in deciding whether you want the opponent to know whether you're holding a particular card or not. For example, you might want to hide the fact that you're holding a high-cost monster if your gold-grabbing creature is about to attack and your opponent might not trade with it.

As for the land-counting mechanic, another problem I mentioned is that in most games, the player who went last can't win with land count until the mid game when players start missing land drops. A mechanic shouldn't depend that heavily on who goes first. However, it's possible to make all the land count cards into high-cost late game cards. I still don't think I could keep track easily, though. I know I could try to think, "ok, I know was +2 lands last turn. Now he played a land, so my lead is only +1 land" but I lose track of those things very easily when I have other things to think during the game.

We'd be compelled to make a discard spell appropriate to the set. "Target player discards a revealed card" isn't the answer because that punishes us for playing along with reveal-duel. We want the opposite:

What Else You Got? B
Sorcery
Target opponent reveals a card from his or her hand, then discards an unrevealed card at random.

That's not amazing, but I like that it solves the random-discard getting your last land card problem while encouraging the set's main mechanic.